Our short questionnaire is completely anonymous and should only take a minute or two of your time. It is open to web designers of all levels of experience (including agencies)

UPDATE: 17/12/09 – An additional 150 survey responses have been added to the results (220 in total) with more reports being added soon!

Obviously, the more people that complete the questionnaire the more accurate the data will be so I’d really, really appreciate any links or tweets to help spread the word.

Thanks for taking part

The Results

We are pleased to publish our results based on the first batch of responses to our web design pricing questionnaire. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this post so far!

To ensure we can provide the most accurate feedback we will be leaving the questionnaire open and will be updating the results every couple of weeks based on new data so please feel free to complete the survey if you haven’t already done so.

Please note: All currency conversions are approximate and based on the correct rate on the date of publication.

Number of responses data is based on: 220

Date last updated: 17th December 2009

Thanks to everyone who has submitted their rates for this survey! Hopefully the results will grow and grow over time to provide an increasingly accurate indication of web design rates. If you haven’t already submitted your rates please feel free to do so at the top of this page.

If you have any additional reports you’d like to see please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to arrange this for the next update.

Interesting results – Something definitely to bear in mind when I start taking on work.
Interesting how 10 yrs + charge an average less than the 9-10yr experienced. Short changing yourselves guys/gals! :-p

Thanks for commenting Pete. Unfortunately, from the first batch of responses I had only 3 were from agencies so I’m waiting until we get a bit more data.

When we have more information I’ll work out the difference between part time freelance / full time freelance and agency rates and add them to the results. The questionnaire is still open so hopefully we’ll have enough data within about a week.

Hi Lee. Yep, I plan to add more reports based on country data very soon. I’ve had another 30 completed surveys since publishing this batch of results so there should be enough for some good geographic data soon!

Sorry I hate to do this but there are a number of issues with the data this survey will collect!

Each agency and freelancer will consider a different set of features ‘core’ for a content management system or e-commerce site. That’s why there is why there is a range between £360 and £12,000 for an e-commerce site.

A more in-depth survey would give far more reliable results that would actually be of use to the community.

Hi Ash. Yes, I agree, it is difficult to give an accurate figure based on the vague descriptions of each project. In the next update to the data I’ll be introducing additional reports that separate freelancers and agency results and also some geographic reports too.

Very interesting stats. I’m really looking forward to seeing the geographical data. My personal prediction is that once broken down the gap between the highs and lows for website design prices will shrink considerably by region.

I concur with what Ross is saying, people need to start charging more. More and more people are undercutting each other to get the business then it gets down to the cheapest quote and its a bloody template.

I don’t know how I happened to stumple upon this post and your fantastic website, but I am happy I did. This is a great post that I’m sure a lot of young website developers like me who are trying to make the switch to be a full-time freelancer will find interesting. I sure did. It is just another peice of assurance staring me in the face, tell me that I need to not be charging so little for my services. I’m learning how to deal with it though. Thank you so much!

Then again I have a beautiful portfolio and pay a lot of attention to detail, which takes time and skill. But I wouldn’t say I am a superstar designer or anything. In fact I am a lousy networker and have no gallery featured websites or a Twitter following or famous clients in my portfolio.

What can I say, I just know what I’m worth?

People, charge what you’re worth! The survey results so far are scaring me!

LDC – or all fool your clients for not looking around But then again it all depends on your client base and their requirement. For example I used to work for jaguar cars and they wouldn’t even talk with an agency unless charged OVER a certain amount (it was seen as the higher the cost the better the work would be, which isn’t true..lol)

We’re an agency of 7 employees who eat, drink & live zen cart ecommerce and can offer an ecommerce website fot less than £200 (yes under 200!) see http://www.JSWeb.co.uk/silver.

Great work on collating this info so far Phil, perhaps a follow up survey could be setup specific to each section CMS/ECommerce/etc

JSWeb – Well! Many of my clients have come to me after a bad experience with another designer, having heard about me from someone they know. Then they see the difference in the quality and the experience when working with someone like me – because I truly care about their project and their success. So I get repeat business. And yet other referrals. And the clients don’t act like they know better than me how things should be designed. They listen to what I have to say. That’s the added bonus when they are paying me good money!

I think sooner or later people learn that they get what they pay for. I guess anyone could charge £200 for a whole website, but I doubt that while working on it they would have the emotional capacity to truly care about the project and create something amazing for their client.

Good Stats to know and nicely presented…
Im not a designer, but in fact an internet-marketer..
So, If I need custom work I ALWAYS outsource using freelance sites… and always get very good value for money.. on the downside – sometimes poor communication .

It seems very competitive but even though there is alot of competition the market is satured with designers (maybe not all decent). It still shows the skilled / good designers are earning what they deserve which is great.

I wonder how foreign markets are compared to these stats eg: USA, Australia etc…

As mentioned above, also interesting to see who are agencies, freelancers and smaller companies.

I had a meeting today with a medium size business today they decided to bring another company on the table to kind of choose which company they wanted to go forward with; the other company was charging twice, and to my experience the guy was very old school, however he was much old and he was charging a bit more then my company. His proposal was stupid and very general despite all that he got the job.
So I kind of think its best to charge client as much as possible and just keep saying we are the greatest and we have lots of resources and all other companies are stupid.

Sadly now I think this is the best way to charge the client and be successful, lol

Excellent idea and a very well presented survey. I have one question though. How can you be certain that everything that people completed in the survey is for real. I am referring to the prices here. Maybe some of them revealed some higher or lower prices in order force the prices up or down.

Great resource, but i agree with @john, other metrics might be more useful.

For example:
– instead of average rates, mediana might more accurately reflect “real average” prices
– instead of high and low prices, standard deviation channel would work better, because you discard extremes.

Just my 2 cents.

@Phil maybe you could post a csv file with the data so everyone would be able to make calculations for himself?

Thank you so much for your innovative way of finding answers to a very elusive question. I’m in the fortunate position where I am able to offer quality websites at very affordable prices. I’ve decided that I won’t be upping my prices inspite of these results!! All very fascinating. Thanks.

Thanks, this is a great idea and invaluable to someone like myself who has just set up on my own, its always difficult pricing web design jobs and how much to charge per hour so good to see where I fit in.

£122 for an ecommerce site!? Who are these people? Even for offshore outsourcing prices, that’s ridiculously low! The averages sound reasonable (for SME level of service/quality), although the higher end of things is more sensible for anyone serious about seeing a good return on their investment and any chance of success with their website.

I don’t know how I happened to stumple upon this post and your fantastic website, but I am happy I did. This is a great post that I’m sure a lot of young website developers like me who are trying to make the switch to be a full-time freelancer will find interesting. I sure did. It is just another peice of assurance staring me in the face, tell me that I need to not be charging so little for my services. I’m learning how to deal with it though. Thank you so much!

. I’m in the fortunate position where I am able to offer quality websites at very affordable prices. I’ve decided that I won’t be upping my prices inspite of these results!! All very fascinating. Thanks.

Just wanted to say a big thank you for this – I’m just starting up my own freelance business, and was looking for a frame of reference for my own costs – it seems I’m right “on the money”, if you’ll excuse the pun!

This is helpful
even though there is no pricing standards and structure this article gave me the insight where I now realize what the competition is and how I can improve my pricing for static sites or dynamic site
many thanks for sharing this with us
Cheers

Thank you for the post. The thing I find about about website design prices is that prices vary greatly depending on the set up of the company. There are professional website design companies that charge just a few hundred pounds for a well designed multiple site and less than a £1000 for Ecommerce basically because they outsource to offs shore web designers (common practice these days).

People shouldn’t therefore assume you’ll get a template or poorly designed site if you are paying less than the prices on this page. I’d be interested to know which web design company does better – the company that charges less or the company that charges more?

Nicely presented and some good stats to quote.
I always try where possible outsource and would lie to think that I always get very good value for money, main problem sometimes is poor communication though.

I got a bit more data after it closed but not too much. I was thinking of running it again this year but with different questions. Maybe something along the lines of “what would you quote for this project” and supply a couple of proposals to see how people interprut them.

Great idea for a costing exercise considering many graphic designers only disclose fees to clients once they have contacted them for a quote. It is interesting to compare the lowest and highest fees for examples websites. Quite a difference in price.

I think this is one of the most vital info for me. And i’m glad reading your article. The site style is wonderful, the articles is really great. This website has got only some really useful info on it! Also it has excellent and very informative.

Always interesting to see what other companies are charging. It seems so many companies just seem to pull numbers out of the air nowadays. Although it’s dated it’s nice to be able to compare prices with our own.